Polltab
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Polltab voting security features

polltab security

How Polltab Cast Votes

When you create a poll on polltab you can imagine a unique voting box allocated for your specific poll to handle all votes coming in. For voting security IP SPECIFIC and higher, the voting box handles votes in a unique ticketing manner. Each voter will have a unique ID (IP address), and when they attempt to cast a vote they will send polltab their unique ID. This unique ID is placed in the box only if the box does not already contain the unique ID. The total amount of votes are computed by the total number of unique IDs.

For example if your poll uses IP Specific voting security, each participant's unique ID will be their IP address. An IP address is a unique address provided by your internet service provider. This makes each vote unique to the users IP address.

Polltab voting security options

  • Cookie Based
    • This voting option allows participants to cast a vote per browser. This means if the user decides to use three different browsers they can cast three votes.
  • IP Specific
    • This voting option restricts voting per IP address. If voters of your poll are in the same building using the same network (e.g. schools or work offices), you may end up with lots of users unable to vote. I suggest using cookie or authentication based voting if you're sharing the poll in the same network.
  • Social Authentication (Google, Facebook, Reddit, Twitch)
    • Polltab offers an additional layer of security using social authentication (oauth) provided by popular services like Google, and Facebook.
      For example by selecting google authentication as your voting security, voters are asked to login to their google account and provide basic public information to the application (polltab) requesting it. Polltab will only use the voter's google ID, which is usually a long numeric integer (344221) to cast the vote. Each user will have a unique ID, and thus we can use that to register an authentic vote, no other information is stored.

FAQ on voting security

Is the default IP specific security sufficient?

For most polls, using IP specific security is reliable. For more serious polls, tech savvy online participants could potentially cast multiple votes if they can figure out how to manipulate their ip addresses when casting a vote. In an unlikely event, a user could create a bot to cast multiple votes automatically. To help prevent bots you can enable our captcha option as described in how to create a poll.

If I use authentication security options like Google or Facebook, can users still cast multiple votes?

Authentication based polls are also based on unique IDs, participants with more than one Google, or Facebook account would be able to cast more than one vote.

If you have more questions about voting security, or when this feature will be released please contact us for more information.